Apple using custom ARM core for A6 to balance performance/watt

Alleged benchmarks verify Apple's "2x" performance claims.

Apple may finally be reaping the benefits of its acquisitions of chip designers PA Semi and Intrinsity with the iPhone 5, according to sources speaking to AnandTech. The A6 processor that powers Apple's newest iPhone is using neither rehashed Cortex A9 cores, nor the upcoming Cortex A15, but an original design based on ARM's armv7s architecture. Along with the move to a 32nm process and the power efficient design that PA Semi and Intrinsity engineers are known for, Apple's bespoke design appears to deliver double the performance of the A5 used in the iPhone 4S, at about the same, or even slightly less, power draw.

The iPhone 5 doesn't ship until this Friday, September 21, and it will be some time before ChipWorks can do its usual die shot analysis of the A6 silicon itself. However, sources for AnandTech have confirmed that the A6 uses a custom ARM architecture core design. The news is important, because it shows that Apple has managed to move away from using Samsung's processor designs for its mobile devices. It also proves that Apple is willing and able to design mobile processors to best suit the needs of its devices.

From "tweaked" to "bespoke"

Older iPhones used essentially stock ARM-based processors sourced from Samsung, while the A4 chip that debuted in the iPad in 2010 was Apple's first "customized" mobile processor. That chip, based on ARM's Cortex A8 CPU core and an Imagination Technologies PowerVR GPU core, essentially contained a tweaked Hummingbird processor core designed by Intrinsity for low-power operation. Though not identical, the A4 was very similar to the processors Samsung used for its Galaxy S smartphones. Apple went on to incorporate the A4 into the iPhone 4 and fourth-generation iPod touch.

Apple had purchased low-power embedded chip design firm PA Semi in April 2008, and later that year former Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted that the acquisition was largely for engineering talent to design chips for Apple's mobile devices. However, the A4 was likely entirely the result of Intrinsity's work, and Apple snapped the firm up in 2010, just after the A4 launched.

It seems likely that engineers from both firms were involved in the design of 2011's A5 processor, which powered the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S. That chip used two customized ARM Cortex A9 cores along with two PowerVR SGX 543MP GPU cores. The A5X processor in the 2012 iPad merely bumped the number of SGX 543 cores to four to account for the increased resolution of the third-gen iPad's Retina display.

Unlike the product introductions over the last two years, which revealed at least little information about the design of its A-series processors, Apple said very little about the A6 inside the iPhone 5. It merely promised twice the compute and graphics performance of the A5, with no penalty in battery life.

We guessed that Apple might be pulling off that feat by using the newer Cortex A15 core design from ARM, and AnandTech originally came to similar conclusions. The version of Xcode that Apple seeded to developers last week to prepare apps for the iPhone 5 supports the same ARM architecture—armv7s—used for the Cortex A15.

But, the Cortex A15 core design is targeted more towards low-power servers and the like; running two Cortex A15 cores inside a mobile device at the kind of clock speeds ARM is targeting would very likely run down the battery in just a couple of hours. From this perspective, Apple wouldn't be able to achieve the performance it claimed for the A6 and still promise an eight hour battery life for the iPhone 5.

Apple's design team shows its prowess

"For a while now I'd heard that Apple was working on its own ARM based CPU core, but last I heard Apple was having issues making it work," Anand Shimpi reported. "I assumed that it was too early for Apple's own design to be ready. It turns out that it's not. Based on a lot of digging over the past couple of days, and conversations with the right people, I've confirmed that Apple's A6 SoC is based on Apple's own ARM based CPU core and not the Cortex A15," he wrote Saturday.

Geekbench results for the A6 also appeared in PrimateLabs' benchmark database over the weekend; though unconfirmed, AnandTech believes that the results are highly plausible, and are in line with Apple's performance claims. So, instead of a power-hungry A15 core, Apple appears to be employing a custom ARM core design that implements the armv7s architectural improvements, along with increased RAM, vastly improved memory bandwidth, and a slightly faster clock.

The A5 contained two Cortex A9 cores running at approximately 800MHz, 6.4GB/s of theoretical memory bandwidth, and 512MB of RAM. The A6, in contrast, runs two custom armv7s-compatible cores at 1GHz, with 8.5GB/s of raw memory bandwidth, and 1GB of RAM. The alleged Geekbench results show that actual memory operations are from 2-6 times faster in the A6, as well—this improved memory access keeps the processor filled with relevant data to crunch. Those changes taken together can account for Apple's "2x" performance claim, while a switch from a 45nm process to a 32nm process would balance the power requirements for the improved core and clock speed.

It's also likely that Apple's engineers have employed significant power gating and clock gating in order to keep power requirements to a minimum. Consider the fact that the iPhone 5 is significantly thinner and lighter than previous iPhones. Chances are that the battery may be similar, or even slightly less volume than before, so it's entirely possible that the A6 is even more power efficient overall than the A5.

As for the GPU, there's still no solid evidence about its design. However, AnandTech posits that the A6 may contain three PowerVR SGX 543 cores running at a higher clock speed than the two SGX 543 cores in the A5—this would be "the best of both worlds," according to AnandTech. "You don't take a huge die area penalty and at the same time don't run at a significantly higher frequency, and you can get to that same 2x [performance] value."

It's clear that Apple is no mere integrator of off-the-shelf parts. The path from using bog-standard ARM systems-on-a-chip to a fully custom design as been four years in the making, and I look forward to seeing where Apple will take this approach in the future.

145 Reader Comments

It's interesting to note that these geekbench scores (there are now two at ~1600), if proven accurate, indicate that the A6 is getting similar performance to a PowerMac G5, better than an iMac G5, and similar to the low end, low power, early Core 2 Duo's. Pretty amazing how quickly these mobile CPUs are progressing, and closing the gap on low end laptop/desktop CPUs.

Yes--and ironically there are plenty of people clamoring that there hasn't been much progress in mobile hardware.

That may be the case in the superficial (depending upon POV), but not at all regarding the underlying tech.

Perhaps the performance gains in the mobile arena will spill over to the desktop and server room. Substantial gains in energy efficiency would be of great benefit to everyone...

Even better, unless you're talking about buying one-off designs from a Saville Row tailor, don't even use that word at all.

Bespoke means a lot of things. It means furniture. It means audio products. It means anything that been hightly customized. It means that no one here reads British publications, or has ever gone to the UK.

I wonder if Apple should've focused more on the CPU during the keynote. They didn't really have anything big to point to, but they could've talked about this CPU and said, "This time, we're going back to basics with the fastest and most energy efficient mobile processor ever!"

It might've avoided a lot of ridicule and brought some techy seriousness back to the iPhone.

That sounds like something Jobs would have done, but they're damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they'd started throwing around superlatives a bunch of techies would complained about that.

Yeah, I remember some of the comments here w/ the iPad 3, and people (including quotes from Woz) bitching about how Steve would never have put up CPU specs and yada yada. It worked out fine in the end this time - Apple didn't seem too overly techy, and the A6 is touted by none other than The Anand...

I wonder if Apple should've focused more on the CPU during the keynote. They didn't really have anything big to point to, but they could've talked about this CPU and said, "This time, we're going back to basics with the fastest and most energy efficient mobile processor ever!"

It might've avoided a lot of ridicule and brought some techy seriousness back to the iPhone.

The only ridicule they’ve endured is from certain sections of the nerd elite who cannot fathom anything beyond specs & acronyms. Surely 2 million pre-sales and a first weekend sell through of 6-8 million units show most people are far, far removed from the navel gazers who post on technology blogs.

think the G5 stopped steve from concentrating so much on tech specs. never again.

Oh yeah--didn't he have a lot of crow to eat at that time, due to the delays at IBM? IIRC, there was a significant pushback on the release of the Xserves running on them. Was that pretty much the nail in the coffin of the IBM/Apple relationship?

AFAIK, TI, Samsung, and Nvidia just produce SoCs that use off-the-shelf ARM core designs (e.g., Cortex A8, Cortex A9, and presumably next year Cortex A15). Qualcomm (and now Apple) are the only ones that design their own cores.

There used to also be StrongARM which was a DEC design, sold to Intel who dumped it a few years ago to concentrate on x86. Somebody bought it cheap from Intel but I don't know if there are any new designs for it.

Intel still owns ARM licenses. They can produce any ARM processor they want. They don't currently as far as I know, retired these last 11 years I no longer track it with much interest.

XScale (the Intel carry on from DEC's strongARM) was sold to Marvel in June 2006.

Personally I was really disappointed as it was a great product line with Intel's best in class fab processes behind it. But the all miserable Atom was backed by marketing and thus XScale had to leave to free up funds for Atom.

No, A15 is not designed for servers. No, A15 is not 64 bit. Yes, A15 delivers around twice the performance compared to A9 clock-for-clock, and gets better average battery life because of big.LITTLE. No, Hummingbird was a marketing name Samsung slapped onto some of their inhouse-designed A8 and A9 based SoCs. (To counter 'Snapdragon' etc)

ARM's own freaking web pages say that A15 was designed for servers, among other things.Why do you think it has support for a 40bit address space and for virtual machines? You expect phone manufacturers to we wanting those features in the next two years?

You are, however, correct that it's not 64-bit. That's coming up next. A15 uses PAE.

Even better, unless you're talking about buying one-off designs from a Saville Row tailor, don't even use that word at all.

Bespoke means a lot of things. It means furniture. It means audio products. It means anything that been hightly customized. It means that no one here reads British publications, or has ever gone to the UK.

I read the AT article, and I don't recall him citing sources as to the exact nature of the A6. In particular, he was told it wasn't cortex a9 based, but we don't know that it isn't in fact a krait chip.. The architecture anand described seemed basically krait-like. Couple that with the expected graphics bump, memory bandwidth, and vfp4 and you have a dual core krait with adreno 320.

Isn't there a problem with the krait theory in that the A6, clocked at 1000 Mhz, bests krait designs clocked at 1500 Mhz?

Who says it bests Krait? The Geekbench test? Look carefully. All of those processors beat the A6 by a fair margin. As the article mentions, the A6 makes up for it in vastly improved memory bandwidth and memory speed. Geekbench doesn't measure only processor performance, which means Apple's A6 can make up for the difference with other stuff.

Please, for the love of god, if you're going to talk about "chip A bests chip B" fscking DEFINE what "bests" means to you. If you're not willing to do that, we get this pointless "discussion" where people point actual damn benchmark numbers and we still get idiots claiming "well. I don't trust that benchmark".

I wonder if Apple should've focused more on the CPU during the keynote. They didn't really have anything big to point to, but they could've talked about this CPU and said, "This time, we're going back to basics with the fastest and most energy efficient mobile processor ever!"

It might've avoided a lot of ridicule and brought some techy seriousness back to the iPhone.

The only ridicule they’ve endured is from certain sections of the nerd elite who cannot fathom anything beyond specs & acronyms. Surely 2 million pre-sales and a first weekend sell through of 6-8 million units show most people are far, far removed from the navel gazers who post on technology blogs.

think the G5 stopped steve from concentrating so much on tech specs. never again.

Oh yeah--didn't he have a lot of crow to eat at that time, due to the delays at IBM? IIRC, there was a significant pushback on the release of the Xserves running on them. Was that pretty much the nail in the coffin of the IBM/Apple relationship?

The nail was the lack of the promised G5 chip for their laptops. Everyone was having major problems at the time. Actually, IBM was doing slightly better with G5 speed increases, despite their failure of meeting the 3GHz speed they also promised Apple.

This is really big. Apple is truly back in the "design the whole device" business. And it gives serious credence to the rumors that Apple is going to migrate its mobile computers to ARM in the near-ish future. I'm surprised nobody has picked up on this aspect of the article. This looming change may also explain to some extent why they were subdued in promoting the A6 as in-house.

And I'd like to give a little shout-out to Lightning. Apple has finally made a connector which you can just plug in. You know, in theory there's a 50% chance of getting the orientation right, yet it never seems to go. Why hasn't anybody ever made a mainstream smartphone that you can just plug in? It's these little touches that turn grown men into Apple fanboys.

I'm quite sure I read right here in the Ars Technica forums that, not only the chip, but in fact the entire iPhone is just a rebadged Samsung design, and that Apple doesn't add anything but marketing.

Given this well-sourced fact, how could anyone believe that Apple has designed their own mainboard, much less their own chip?

Is this a joke? From forums you were told otherwise and you are buying that over well respected journalists like Anand?

It's already a well known fact that Apple does much of their own designs. Not only the main board but also several processors as well (more tweaking until possibly the A6). Samsung fabs some of their stuff, which Apple seems intent on changing at some point.

*woosh*

Looks like somebody's sarcasm detector is broken. That's usually the kind of stuff trolls say to bash Apple. While I'm relatively neutral about this kind of thing, I've been noticing more trolling from the Android camp than the Apple camp.

"Apple must have stole Samsung's rectangle and patented it!""Apple doesn't do anything, Samsung makes all the parts for them!""Looks like all the iSheep are already lining up to buy the new iPoop"

I think Samsung should have just charged Apple $500/piece for each of the first 2 million processors they ordered for the iPhone 5.

That should pretty much even out the $1billion settlement, Apple could have just claimed the first 2 million phones were special (I don't know, do something silly like carve your name on the back for you?... oh, wait) and charged $800/ea for them.

That seems reasonable, right?

So you think Samsung should send a message to every other company on earth that no-one should ever do business with them again because they don't know how to follow a simple contract?Every retailer? Every raw materials supplier? Everybody who uses their fabs, buys their HDs, their screens, their memory, their flash?Destroy the company in some bizarre attempt to punish Apple that won't work because there's obviously a contract between them and Apple for the A6 listing prices, schedules, etc, that will be upheld by any court on earth?

3) Hardware virtualization can be used in enterprise, to have a "personal" OS instance, and a "work" one, or whatever.

I see hypervisor and security in there as well. A subject very important in a mobile device.

Riemann Zeta wrote:

If the A15 is designed for servers and not electronics, then it is doubtful to ever see any use. Good old x86 still rules servers, even despite Intel's epic waste of $2-3 billion attempting to kill it and replace it with (the now dead) Itanium.

The Itanium is an interesting design a bit ahead of it's time, fight a lot of market inertia.

Geekbench scores are just one measure of a device - and one, like so many other measures (miles per gallon, sunspider, etc.) that can be designed to. I find it more interesting that the iPhone 4S does appallingly on GB compared to the S3, yet feels just as fast when I compare it to a friend's S3 in actual use.

Makes me think that processor speed is actually a lot less relevant in smartphones than is being debated here.

Let's see, IBM's *incredibly* hot-running G5 chips led to what I consider the best thermal design ever in a desktop workstation. If the Pentium 4 was a space heater, that was… God, I have no idea where that metaphor's going.

I like the itanium in theory, but nobody ever got around to making desktop-level software optimized for it. Quite a shame.

And Sulis, that processor speed versus responsiveness thing is because iOS runs the GUI in realtime, possibly with a higher priority than the kernel. Android is forced by early architecture decisions to run it in userland priorities; getting the same megaflop-to-responsiveness ratio would more or less require all Android software ever to be rewritten from scratch. Which Apple would have done, I suspect, in Google's shoes.

I read the AT article, and I don't recall him citing sources as to the exact nature of the A6. In particular, he was told it wasn't cortex a9 based, but we don't know that it isn't in fact a krait chip.. The architecture anand described seemed basically krait-like. Couple that with the expected graphics bump, memory bandwidth, and vfp4 and you have a dual core krait with adreno 320.

Isn't there a problem with the krait theory in that the A6, clocked at 1000 Mhz, bests krait designs clocked at 1500 Mhz?

How do you propose to test these chips without the OS getting in the way?Besides, do you have a reference for the A6 being 50% more efficient?

<..> You know, in theory there's a 50% chance of getting the orientation right, yet it never seems to go. Why hasn't anybody ever made a mainstream smartphone that you can just plug in? It's these little touches that turn grown men into Apple fanboys.

You can turn Apple's new plug by 180 degrees and it will still plug in correctly.

If you make a symmetrical equilateral triangular plug, you would be able to rotate it by 120 degrees and it will still plug in correctly, giving you one more orientation as an option. With a square plug, you could think of four different ways to plug it in, and with some clever design they can all work. You get the point from there.

Why hasn't anybody ever made a plug that is orientation independent and has even more degrees of freedom? It's lack of imagination that turns anyone into a fanboy.

Well, most Nokia phones used to come with a circular power plug, which should answer that call. Unfortunately, it's socket was also well-nigh indistinguishable from the headphone plug socket, which caused no little confusion...

You could certainly make a circular docking plug which was segmented along its length, I suppose...

All we have at this point is Geekbench, where it is near the top but a few percent below the top Samsung chip.

Actually, when the first iPhone 5 score was posted, the Galaxy S III was sitting at 1560. As I type this, it's at 1728, an impressive 10.8% increase in overall performance. The Asus Nexus 7 tablet got a little bump as well; it was nearly as fast as the iPhone 5, but now it's a bit faster.

The nail was the lack of the promised G5 chip for their laptops. Everyone was having major problems at the time. Actually, IBM was doing slightly better with G5 speed increases, despite their failure of meeting the 3GHz speed they also promised Apple.

More or less, yes. At the G5 launch, Steve said that we should see 3 GHz inside a year. As we know, they got to 2.5 GHz with water cooling, due to the issues with 90nm. He wouldn't have made that promise unless someone at IBM assured him that that would happen. This soured him on the relationship. Otellini likely noticed, and as soon as he grabbed the top spot at Intel, he came knocking with some rather impressive Conroe slides. Eventually, IBM changed the key account responsible for Apple, and the new one was supposed to get Apple to pay for a mobile G5 the same way someone like Sony paid to have the Cell developed and fabbed. At this point, Apple jumped ship. They had had the plans mostly ready before the G5, and now they were just activated. It all went well, as we know, but it's a little but boring. A Power5-based G6 with an integrated memory controller would have been very interesting to see.

I wonder if Apple should've focused more on the CPU during the keynote. They didn't really have anything big to point to, but they could've talked about this CPU and said, "This time, we're going back to basics with the fastest and most energy efficient mobile processor ever!"

It might've avoided a lot of ridicule and brought some techy seriousness back to the iPhone.

The fact is that they don't care to have "techy seriousness" in their keynotes and presentations, because the target audience doesn't give a "beep" for those things. Telling the average customer that they don't use an A15, but a self designed variant of the Armv7 is probably a bad marketing move. What people want to know is how faster is in comparison to the previous models adn that's it.

It would indeed be impressive if Apple designed their own ARMv7 compatible CPU.There other possibilities though, namely that this new CPU core is either a Samsung design or a joint Apple / Samsung development.

Apple's "A" series mobile SoCs are fabbed by Samsung who are one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world, are an ARM licensee and make ARM based SoCs by the million for their own devices which, up until now, have used standard ARM CPU designs.

Samsung's SoCs, and the mobile devices use them, are in direct competition with SoCs and mobile devices that use other custom ARM compatible CPUs such as those made by Qualcomm. If the CPUs in Qualcomm's SoCs have a performance or power usage advantage over standard ARM cores, I'm certain that Samsung would be very interested in pursuing their own custom ARM compatible design for use in their own mobile devices. Samsung certainly have the resources to pursue such a custom design. A partner such as Apple who would like to use this new design and who would possibly collaborate on the design or provide funding would make the case even more compelling for Samsung.

This is conjecture of course, but I would not be surprised if we soon start to see Samsung mobile devices using a very similar CPU core to the A6.

It's interesting to note that these geekbench scores (there are now two at ~1600), if proven accurate, indicate that the A6 is getting similar performance to a PowerMac G5, better than an iMac G5, and similar to the low end, low power, early Core 2 Duo's. Pretty amazing how quickly these mobile CPUs are progressing, and closing the gap on low end laptop/desktop CPUs.

It is certainly impressive from a technological point of view, but it seems (to a lot of us) hollow when you think how much the vendor restricts you from being able to make use of the device.

Effectively my N900 is way more "powerful" than so many of these phones with much faster processors and more ram simply because it allows me to store the files I want to store, works with the formats that I want to work with and run the software I want to run.

So while phones with processors like the A6 might be closer to a laptop or desktop processor in terms of raw power, the experience is what I would describe as "neutered". The N900 feels much more like having a laptop / desktop in my pocket - although not a particularly fast one!

Please stop giving Apple credit without any kind of justification. It's no more bespoke than the stupid claim that rounding the corners of a rectangle and putting minimal buttons is owned and created by Apple.

It's time the media got it's head from up it's arse and actually looked at what they write from an OBJECTIVE stand point.

It's this total circle jerk between readers and writers, where the truth no longer matters and words that have no justification perpetuate the myth that Apple invented the fucking smartphone.

Now they are making their own chips, according to this article. When they are merely modifying a design created by ARM.

What a load of bollocks. There isn't even any hard evidence provided, merely subjective bullshit. Lapped up by the iPhone freaks and then regurgitated elsewhere by idiots.

I guarentee there is nothing "special", in a generic sense, about Apple's design. They cheated by designing a software environment with known, predictable behavior, which I guarentee was designed from the start to be highly optimizemable through custom logic and hardware resources. Note how the iPhone 5 is INCOMPATIBLE with iOS < 6? Wonder why? Because none of this would be possible if iOS wasn't dealing a stacked deck to the electronics. Nobody can, nor ever, will be able to compete with this. I bet my house that android or any other OS would drag compared to iOS on the A6. The question is whether the "feature" gap between android and iOS in terms of software behavior restrictions is large enough to overcome what will likely become a huge performance gap in terms of real application performance.

And by the way, Apple clearly thinks they can do the same thing in the laptop market. The real question will be how big of a performance gap can the leverage. I figure it's gonna have to be real big.

I guarentee there is nothing "special", in a generic sense, about Apple's design. They cheated by designing a software environment with known, predictable behavior, which I guarentee was designed from the start to be highly optimizemable through custom logic and hardware resources. Note how the iPhone 5 is INCOMPATIBLE with iOS < 6? Wonder why? Because none of this would be possible if iOS wasn't dealing a stacked deck to the electronics. Nobody can, nor ever, will be able to compete with this. I bet my house that android or any other OS would drag compared to iOS on the A6. The question is whether the "feature" gap between android and iOS in terms of software behavior restrictions is large enough to overcome what will likely become a huge performance gap in terms of real application performance.

And by the way, Apple clearly thinks they can do the same thing in the laptop market. The real question will be how big of a performance gap can the leverage. I figure it's gonna have to be real big.

How exactly is any of that actually cheating? Planning ahead, making things that work together well and optimizing the hardware and software just seems like a good idea.

Please stop giving Apple credit without any kind of justification. It's no more bespoke than the stupid claim that rounding the corners of a rectangle and putting minimal buttons is owned and created by Apple.

It's time the media got it's head from up it's arse and actually looked at what they write from an OBJECTIVE stand point.

It's this total circle jerk between readers and writers, where the truth no longer matters and words that have no justification perpetuate the myth that Apple invented the fucking smartphone.

Now they are making their own chips, according to this article. When they are merely modifying a design created by ARM.

What a load of bollocks. There isn't even any hard evidence provided, merely subjective bullshit. Lapped up by the iPhone freaks and then regurgitated elsewhere by idiots.

Merely modifying a design is what bespoke means. You sound ignorant.

And for the last time, you can't argue the English language this way. Even if you knew what bespoke means, there's no central authority for English to appeal to. Bespoke is commonly used the way it is in the article, and that's makes any arguments over usage moot, given that the basic rules of grammar and spelling are followed.

Feel free to act superior in your so-called command of the English language, but it's not a command-and-control based language like French or C#.

I guarentee there is nothing "special", in a generic sense, about Apple's design. They cheated by designing a software environment with known, predictable behavior, which I guarentee was designed from the start to be highly optimizemable through custom logic and hardware resources. Note how the iPhone 5 is INCOMPATIBLE with iOS < 6? Wonder why? Because none of this would be possible if iOS wasn't dealing a stacked deck to the electronics. Nobody can, nor ever, will be able to compete with this. I bet my house that android or any other OS would drag compared to iOS on the A6. The question is whether the "feature" gap between android and iOS in terms of software behavior restrictions is large enough to overcome what will likely become a huge performance gap in terms of real application performance.

And by the way, Apple clearly thinks they can do the same thing in the laptop market. The real question will be how big of a performance gap can the leverage. I figure it's gonna have to be real big.

This isn't 'cheating'. What an odd statement. They're serving their customers better.

It means "made to order", which this processor is... You could argue that tweaked is synonymous with bespoke and so the heading - From "tweaked" to "bespoke" - kind of doesn't make much sense and sounds redundant, but, whatever.

At the risk of further derailing the thread, a bespoke CPU would be custom designed for every user. You don't mass-produce bespoke items, as then they're no longer bespoke.

What a strange word!

Silly, the bespoke CPU was custom made for the iPhone 5. You target the recipient of the item for what(who?) it is intended.

Please stop giving Apple credit without any kind of justification. It's no more bespoke than the stupid claim that rounding the corners of a rectangle and putting minimal buttons is owned and created by Apple.

It's time the media got it's head from up it's arse and actually looked at what they write from an OBJECTIVE stand point.

It's this total circle jerk between readers and writers, where the truth no longer matters and words that have no justification perpetuate the myth that Apple invented the fucking smartphone.

Now they are making their own chips, according to this article. When they are merely modifying a design created by ARM.

What a load of bollocks. There isn't even any hard evidence provided, merely subjective bullshit. Lapped up by the iPhone freaks and then regurgitated elsewhere by idiots.

I guarentee there is nothing "special", in a generic sense, about Apple's design. They cheated by designing a software environment with known, predictable behavior, which I guarentee was designed from the start to be highly optimizemable through custom logic and hardware resources. Note how the iPhone 5 is INCOMPATIBLE with iOS < 6? Wonder why? Because none of this would be possible if iOS wasn't dealing a stacked deck to the electronics. Nobody can, nor ever, will be able to compete with this. I bet my house that android or any other OS would drag compared to iOS on the A6. The question is whether the "feature" gap between android and iOS in terms of software behavior restrictions is large enough to overcome what will likely become a huge performance gap in terms of real application performance.

And by the way, Apple clearly thinks they can do the same thing in the laptop market. The real question will be how big of a performance gap can the leverage. I figure it's gonna have to be real big.

This isn't 'cheating'. What an odd statement. They're serving their customers better.

Of course it isn't cheating. It was meant tongue in cheek in reference to comments which inferred that the A6 benchmarks were inflated because they ran iOS. I am actually very impressed that they have stuck to their guns, and I think they have the right of it. The value is in the experience, and if design elements don't directly contribute to that then they should be removed so the valuable stuff can be optimized. If I need a toy to play with, then I'll shop elsewhere.

If this is a conspiracy theory it's pretty bizarre. The iPhone 5 requires iOS 6 because that's where the drivers are. Why would Apple bother to develop, certify and support drivers for an older version of the OS?